Improved Access to Information: Portals, Content Selection and Digital Information. Papers Presented at the 2003 University of Oklahoma Libraries Annual Conference

Citation

Parry, F. (2005), "Improved Access to Information: Portals, Content Selection and Digital Information. Papers Presented at the 2003 University of Oklahoma Libraries Annual Conference", Online Information Review, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 327-328. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520510607669

The nine conference papers included here cover a wide range of topics around the theme of electronic information. All seem to be trying, in different ways, to answer the question posed in the first chapter by James Michalko: “For whom is the library an anchor?”

Michalko's paper is the first of several on the use of library portals. He reminds us that the library is now just one of many ports of call for students. In the Google age of instant information, users want all resources electronically and avoid those that are not easily accessible. Michalko asks what makes a library portal different from any other kind of web portal. He says that libraries have two big advantages:

1. 1.

   content – the power to purchase and present what users want; and

2. 2.

   trust – libraries are trusted to provide reliable and quality information.

Lizabeth Wilson develops this theme by making a plea for libraries to build their portals on the basis of a thorough understanding of what their users actually want. Her thesis imaginatively compares portal building to the speculative building of a baseball ground in the middle of a cornfield in the film Field of Dreams. Sometimes libraries build their portals on little more than the blind faith that people will come.

Mary Jackson provides a case study of the portal developed for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) called the Scholars Portal Project. It is an interesting and informative paper, and readers may want to bring the story up to date by visiting the Project web site (see www.arl.org/access/scholarsportal/).

There are two other papers on the subject of portals. Lorcan Dempsey in particular provides a masterful analysis of portal development and the ways in which libraries need to rethink their strategies in order to adapt to the new electronic environment.

Away from the theme of library portals, Alice Prochaska's paper on international access in the digital environment discusses in particular the global implications of digitisation projects such as the British Library's efforts to provide open access to the Lindisfarne Gospels or the University of North Carolina's Documenting the American South. The outstanding paper in this collection, however, is Joseph Branin's description of building the knowledge bank at Ohio State University. He begins by giving one of the more lucid explanations of the evolutionary shift from collection building to collection management to knowledge management that I have read. The project that Branin has been fronting is responsible for collecting and managing institutional resources from the digital domain from far outside the scope of the traditional library collections and in collaboration with researchers, technicians and academics.

All these papers contribute to the understanding of what is needed to fulfil the book's major aim – improve access to information. Since the conference, developments in library portals have grown apace and have validated much of what is said in this book. Libraries will need to come to terms with the challenges of new forms of electronic information organisation and management or face a future on the margins.